'Martin Luther, where are you?' Trump and US Evangelicalism

"The political legacy of the Reformation is being largely forgotten in 2017 United States. It has been absorbed largely by white evangelicalism, which has given political support and theological justification to Donald Trump's 'America First' platform."

The nature of these encounters indicates how we are remembering that fateful year 1517 and commemorating the beginning of the religious and political events that changed the course of history.

For example, it is striking that this year's commemorations have focused on the global and ecumenical face of Lutheranism today, whereas a century ago Germany marked the 400th anniversary in a nationalistic way. Luther was invoked in 1917 as a national hero – a "herald of the German fatherland and a German culture under attack by a world of uncivilized enemies".

Another feature of this year's anniversary of the Reformation is the way leaders of nations historically linked to Protestantism are interacting with Roman Catholicism and Pope Francis.

US President Donald Trump, for instance, went to see the pope in May. German Chancellor Angela Merkel will see Francis later this month in what will be their fourth meeting.

Trump and Merkel not only represent two different faces of world politics today, but they also represent two very different aspects of the relationship between Christianity and politics.

Merkel has been German Chancellor since 2005, having been elected three consecutive times to the post. She is poised to run again next September. The daughter of a Lutheran pastor, she has never hidden her Christian faith. In fact, she is one of the rare national leaders in 21st century Europe to accept various invitations to speak at ecclesial gatherings (Lutheran and ecumenical).

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has a very different relationship to religion. It is one that is rather calculating and transactional. He is the president of a nation that, until only recently, conceived itself as being built by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) and continues to believe it is still the most Christian nation in the world.

If Protestantism is a moral and cultural source for Mrs. Merkel's politics (included her politically costly policies for the acceptance of refugees), the Protestantism that is politically supporting Mr. Trump is another example of the distance between Europe and the United States.

In the last US presidential Trump received 81% of the votes of white evangelicals. This group still constitutes the most important religious voting, despite the growing ethnic and religious diversity of the country.

But the political legacy of the Reformation is being largely forgotten in this 2017. Or, better, it has been absorbed largely by white evangelicalism, which has given political support and theological justification to Donald Trump's "America First" platform.

In a sense, if there is an American problem today that is embodied by Donald Trump, there is also a problem of American white Protestantism in Christianity. The German pastor and theologian (and martyr of Nazism), Dietrich Bonhoeffer, famously defined the religious culture of the United States in 1939, during and immediately after his time in America, as "Protestantism without Reformation".

But European theologians of one century ago are not the only ones who have identified the genetic mutation of Protestantism into what is known today as American evangelicalism. There are also white evangelicals in the United States today who publicly acknowledging this.

It was during a panel discussion of Noll's 2005 book (co-authored with Carolyn Nystrom), Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism, that I witnessed the most powerful indictment of contemporary American evangelicalism. It took place ten years at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Atlanta (Georgia).

In his response to the panel, Noll emphasized that the problem of the Reformation was no longer concerned with Catholicism. He said the Reformation has succeeded to some extent by making Catholicism more evangelical. But the problem, he said, is that it still not clear if American Protestantism has remained faithful to the Reformation.

Noll gave a quick description of what continues to pass for American Evangelicalism. It is a declared or undeclared theology of the "prosperity gospel", an aberrant theology that teaches that God rewards faithfulness with financial blessings. Noll concluded his remarks with the powerful question - "Martin Luther, where are you!?".

The triangular relationship between Protestantism, Catholicism and political power in the United States has gone through enormous changes in these last few decades. Among them is the convergence between Catholics and evangelicals on political issues.

These include a "co-belligerency" and advocacy for pro-life causes; the creeping "evangelicalization" of Catholics in conservative politics (see, for example, the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the most powerful Catholic politician in the USA today); and a split within American Protestantism that is not very different from the split within American Catholicism when they vote.

One of the biggest changes is the genetic mutation in the quality of the elites of American Protestantism. This has happened in academia (with the sociological decline of mainline Protestant Churches), in the judicial branch (with the Supreme Court no longer dominated by Protestants) and in the election of politicians (in a US Congress where there are two Catholics for one Baptist, and four Catholics for one Episcopalian).

In this respect it was very instructive to see James Comey, the former FBI director, give his powerful testimony on TV last week against President Trump in a hearing before the Senate intelligence committee. Comey chose for his private Twitter and Instagram accounts the name "Reinhold Niebuhr", the most important American Protestant theologian and ethicist, the greatest public theologian of 20th-century America – a realist and a progressive social thinker. Ironically, Niebuhr's prophetic voice landed him on the FBI watch list.

To be sure, the FBI was very different back in those days. But, then, so was American Protestantism.

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@MassimoFaggioli

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